Tag: google

Google!! Get it together!

The decisions Google makes don’t normally annoy me, except in small geeky ways that most people would pfft at, and you may well pfft at me now but they are seriously annoying me now.

On one hand we have the recent integration of Buzz into Gmail and Google Reader. The upshot being:

  1. You cannot disable Buzz without disabling your carefully tended Google Profile.
  2. Because you cannot disable Buzz, you end up slowly accruing followers — you could ignore them, but you start to look like an ass.
  3. So you follow back and this breaks Google Reader.
  4. So the choice is between using Google Reader OR Google Buzz to read content from others. Google Buzz is so tightly integrated with Google Reader that I can only choose one or the other. There is no way I can see to effectively and simply use both at the same time.

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iPhone Competitors, You Have 4 Months

This might be my next phone…

In about June or July my iPhone contract expires. Looking at the new 4.0 software that won’t run on my 3G phone, and knowing that the next model will be out about then with (hopefully) the newer faster processor and better battery life, I’ll probably be looking to upgrade. The problem is despite loving my iPhone, and what is to come, I abhor that what my iPhone can run is subject to the whims of Apple, and I hate that I’m tied to iTunes in any way.

So this is my wish for all the makers of Android handsets and iPhone/iPad competitors:
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So… Google Wave. This changes everything.

Finally got around to watching this. If Google’s Wave takes off (and it will), it will change everything. This is better than email, better than IM, better than a personal wiki. Within months of this going live, we will have a million new ways to communicate. That they’ve made it open source makes it more likely than any other tool to change how we communicate via the web.

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Someone hacked my Gmail!

Not really.

Google released a small update yesterday that adds information about recent activity on your Gmail account to the bottom of the Gmail interface.

Gmail account activity feature The new option in the Gmail interface

It also includes a link to further information, including details of IP addresses and methods that have recently been used to access your account. If anyone has accessed your mail in any way, it will be reported here.

Gmail Activity Information Argh! What is that?!

I checked mine the minute it showed up in my inbox, and was shocked to see a bunch of IP addresses listed, when I hadn’t been anywhere near my computer in the last five hours.

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Starting the Google Treasure Hunt: How to do the first three questions

Google has been running a “treasurehunt” with unspecified prizes up for grabs for the fastest times to complete the tasks. What it amounts to is four questions spaced over a month, that you can log onto in your own time and attempt to nut out. The questions are randomly generated, but are of a different type each week. The first week was a number/maths problem, the second was a computer/file problem, the third a logic (and slightly computer network) problem. I haven’t seen the final fourth question yet.

I thought I’d jot down how I answered the questions — not my particular answers — as they will be different for other people, but the methods for answering the questions which are the same for each of the four question types.

Please note that I cannot finish the treasure hunt. I got stuck at question four. I wrote up how I did questions one to three before I’d done four and it just seemed like a waste not to post them.

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